Last night someone I love told me that they had decided to marry someone they had first met about two weeks earlier and asked me to wish them luck. (Yes, this has happened to me before at least once). We've been friends for almost 18 months now and I've found her to be very thoughtful and intelligent on every topic... except romantic relationships. When a child talks about love at first sight and Disney-like fairy tales of meeting the handsome, dashing and perfect man it's cute. When someone with a post graduate degree talks about these things to me I quickly find myself pondering if maybe virginity is something that ought to be lost at the earliest convenient time in ones life.
She asked me to wish her luck... I couldn't think of a better way to describe the situation.
See this is where sexually knowledgeable and sexually ignorant cultures diverge.
A sexually ignorant culture prefers arranged marriages and people never talking about sex. Why? Because if you don't know anything about boys/girls and having sexual relationships with them then making a choice is very scary - thus having that choice made for you is something of a relief... especially since the people making the decision are sexually experienced (aka the parents). The next 'advantage' is that if one only has one sexual partner and one type of sexual experience then one will assume that that's all sex is. So when people talk about sex non-descriptively, that's what one will imagine it to be.
But what if you hear friends talking about their sex lives and they seem more interesting and exciting than your own? Once knowledge of other people's sex lives becomes known to you the tendancy is that one will start to compare ones sex life to theirs and start to wonder, "Do I have the best sex life I could have?"
How does a sexually ignorant culture deal with this? Demanding better sex? Demanding the right to explore their sexuality? Demanding to know what this sex thing is all about?
No. They simply don't talk about it. That's why we don't talk about sex with our friends over dinner. Because if we lose the protective shield of our ignorance about sex then we are going to be assaulted by our insecurities. We are going to start asking ourselves uncomfortable questions like:
I am a good lover?
Is my partner a good lover?
Is our sex life the best it could be?
Would I enjoy sex more with that person than my spouse?
People say that arranged marriages are more successful because they don't have as high a divorce rate.
I am aware that this is a ridiculous statement for many reasons but just for now I'm going to ignore most of them and focus only on one problem with it.
If you've only had sex with one other person, who's only had sex with one other person then your sexual experiences with that person define what sex is. If the sex is great, then you think sex is a beautiful positive thing you want your children to discover and explore. If the sex is bad then sex is a disgusting, horrible thing that you want to protect your children from. Hold onto this thought and keep in mind who decides arranged marriages.
Ok, the sex is great, great. But if the sex is bad, which is quite likely because while sex does come naturally, great sex requires practice, learning, dedication and knowledge... which is hard to get if no one talks or writes books about it (I'm so glad to live in a country full of magazines and books about sex, even though we don't often talk about it openly, because this means even two virgin lovers can potentially have great sex too) then we have a problem... but the marriage is fine.
Firstly, why is the marriage fine? Well, they're ignorant to how much better their sex life could be so they don't have any sexual problems in their marriage to worry about. So that's one less pressure for a marriage to end up in divorce.
Secondly, why is this a problem? People who think sex is bad tend to project that viewpoint into every aspect of their lives. I'm talking about people we all know: those who hate/despise sex workers, sluts, women, men, homosexuals, bisexuals, people who enjoy or are relaxed their sexuality etc...
These people are everywhere: doctors, teachers, priests, friends, etc...
These people are ignorant about sex, and sure, part of sex is uncomfortable, bad and harmful... but if it didn't have any good aspects we wouldn't care about it so much either. These people only know a small part about sex but the danger here is that because people don't talk about sex in detail there is a perception that this is all there is to know. Therefore these people feel that they actually know all there is to know about sex. That reassurance can give them the confidence to say and do harmful things to many people... not because they are mean people, but because they sincerely think they are helping them.
Ignorance is what enables good people to do and say bad things.
If you don't want to hurt someone, then you need to get informed.
But the death of ignorance comes at a price, just like in my earlier post describing my personal lost of religious faith.
If you're married to the only sexual partner you've ever had... and you somehow get a hint that something else is happening in the world of sex... maybe you heard the neighbours fucking next door. Maybe you heard to girls gossiping at the bus stop about penises. Maybe you heard a boy describing to his friends what happens when his girlfriend orgasms. Maybe your partner has had sex with someone else. Maybe you just have an intuitive feeling... what if there is more to sex than this?
Then each night, you might lie awake for awhile after sex and wonder. Is this all? Am I lucky? Am I even satified? Am I miserable because I'm not fully reaching climax? Is it normal the way I feel when I'm inside/penetrating them? Am I moody because I don't enjoy sex?
Such anxiety can be dealt with one of two ways:
1. Pathologically: fear, loathing, disgust, misery and hatred.
2. Growth: curiousity, exploration, courage to challenge the habits and the personal dogma of ones sexuality.
As an atheist, I feel that am committed to option 2. I will only live once and I will not let myself spend it hating myself and my fellow human beings. Why hate someone for simply being who they are? As if they had a choice in the matter!
It is now time to go back to why it was so apt for my friend to be wished luck.
When one makes a decision where one knows the situation, one does not ask for luck.
But when one is embarking on a dangerous and uncertain journey that one is helpless to influence the outcome of then one is left with nothing they can do but to wish, pray and hope for good luck.
This is the difference between ignorance and knowledge.
It is so simple. Ignorance is just intellectual laziness. If you take a stand on a topic or a decision without first considering all of the other possibilities and alternative within reach. Then you deserve the consequences of your decision... and even if you somehow stumble blindly onto a good fortune... do you honestly deserve to take the credit for something you didn't work for?
Showing posts with label sex. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sex. Show all posts
01 January, 2010
31 December, 2009
Atheism and Sex
Sex is one of my favourite topics. I spend a great deal of time thinking about it and I don't just mean in the sense of erotic fantasies, although I can't deny that a I do do that too. If you read the newspapers and the billboards you might think that Australian society generally is quite comfortable with the topic of sex... but my experience has generally been the opposite.
Sure, I can sit down with most men and have a discussion over which women are the most attractive, which quickly turns into an argument in my case because I'm quite comfortable pointing out that my tastes in women are not conventional, but if I wanted to bring up a more emotional topic like how I feel at the point of ejaculation then no way! Australian men quickly turn into prudes far too uncomfortable to talk about sexuality with any degree of insight or seriousness.
Strangely, Australians will often criticise foreigners, such as muslims, for being sexually repressed. Yet some of the 'sexiest' people I know are muslims. 'Sexiest' is in parenthesis because really, I don't think many people seriously think about what sexy is... I will get to this in more detail shortly. What I want to make clear at this juncture is that when it comes to talking about emotions and sex Australians are as repressed as that undifferentiated mass of muslims they like to contrast themselves against.
I can see that comment upsetting a lot of people already... good that's part of what I do here. :)
Where religion comes in for me, well I was raised catholic and I was left without any doubt that sex was a disgusting thing. Sure no one ever said explicitly to me that sex was disgusting. But at the same time no one talked about it except in awkward and uncomfortable tones... or in jokes as a rude topic. When ones only exposure to sex (because it is a taboo subject) is from dirty school yard jokes one starts to think that sex is just as unspiritual and dirty as those jokes.
But as a teenager, deeply interested in sex, I came across wicca and paganism. They treat sex in a completely different way... sex is a beautiful, sublime and spiritual experience. Both men and women are encouraged to think of their sexuality as divine and a beautiful aspect of themselves. Whereas catholicism was bent on convincing me that my sexuality was sinful and the pathway to the devil.
Although I am an atheist now I learned a great deal from my reading of wiccan texts on sex. Far more than I ever learned from the Bible... which seems to focus on the proverbial sexual appetite of King David to the point of ridicule and the justification for Lot's multiple acts of incest with his underage daughters. Jesus is a sexless or homosexual figure whom I never felt connected to as a sage on sexuality.
I feel that dogma has deeply harmed our sense of sexuality... because there is no aspect of humanity more involved in creativity and imagination than sex. Dogma stifles creativity and for this reason I feel the religious dogma is usually doomed to be sexophobic in the long run.
Why is sex a creative act? Firstly, the best sex is in ones head. Sure, 1 in 50 people have a face and body that just screams "great sex" but often they have a personality that screams "get stuffed" too. No, for most of us the key to great sex is in our imaginations: in love letters, poems, stories, pillow talk, sexting and erotic fantasy. When I first read about some of the testimony from the witch trials I vividly recall being in the school library feeling profoundly uncomfortable. I was reading about accused witches describing sexual encounters with the devil in graphically detailed confessions, after being tortured of course, and it was giving me powerful erections. I never told anyone this because I felt embarrassed and disgusted with myself. But clearly, there was something in those sexual fantasies created by these poor sexually repressed women that was exciting. Yes, sex with the devil must have been a lot of fun: dangerous, forbidden, exciting and unrepressed.
This brings me to one of the biggest problems of relationships today is keeping sex interesting. Think about this, we as a species have relationship problems because we don't know how to keep sex interesting. If you think this doesn't sound absurd then you've probably been living in a sexually repressed culture all your life. We are surrounded by a huge variety of entertainment forms and we don't ever get so bored of them as we do with our sexual partners. We can keep ourselves going to movies all through our lives, because although our tastes in films might change as we get older we never get bored of new movies so long as they're different, creative, dramatic and interesting.
And yet we get bored of sex? Something that we actually have an orgasm over? Something in my head just screams *crisis* whenever someone hints to me that they aren't satisfied with their sex life.
Again, we don't talk about it, we don't ask about it, we don't give each other practical advice on how to make sex better. Instead we suggest people modify their bodies artificially or through diets and exercise to achieve a sexiness that will rescue us from our woeful sex lives.
In church, no one asks for a genuine prayer from the heart like:
"Dear God, please relieve our poor humble sex lives of their boredom. Send me and my friends passionate sexy and considerate lovers who are not clingy yet deeply respectful. Make sure they are free of STDs and no unwanted pregnancies result. Teach them to touch us in just the right way to maximise the pleasure of our orgasms and find happiness through the bodily means you so generously bestowed on us for this purpose,"
No one would feel comfortable saying that out loud in a church and nor would anyone in the audience likely feel comfortable listening to it... but really... who doesn't secretly wish for a prayer like that to come true?
And as exciting as that prayer is, it still misses the point. Sexiness, like happiness, is all in the mind. If we want great sex we shouldn't be spending so much time worrying about the body. Instead we should be worrying about the heart.
For me, some of the biggest impediments I've had to enjoying sex is worry, fear and guilt. Worry because I'm terrified of disappointing my sexual partner, mostly because no one told me some really important information... like how to have sex - yes, some of you may laugh and say it just comes naturally, but when you've never seen a vagina before, much less felt the inside of one then it's a pretty nerve wracking experience. The kind of nerve wracking experience that gives a man temporary impotence from worry. Just briefly on that point, generally the best cure for impotence is to slow down, relax but not to give up. Instead we tend to ridicule and laugh at men brave enough to admit to having this problem making it much worse... to me that sounds like a psychological strategy to make other men infertile. Interesting, yes? Men can be bitchy too, although they're probably far less aware of what their psychological blows are meant to achieve.
So yes, the how to have sex was never adequately described and in my catholic sexual education, mostly given by female teachers (who obviously felt awkward talking about it to classrooms full of teenage boys), and I graduated with an absurd idea that the vagina was two squiggles of ink on a caricature of a woman. I wonder what the girls imagined a penis to be like? Although a penis is probably more self-explanatory than a vagina which is still a mystery to me to this day and I'm sure it is a mystery to many many women too.
But the secret to great sex is not where you put and touch the various genitals. The secret is being receptive to the experience of having sex. And being receptive is about being comfortable, feeling sexy and excited all at once - all things that happen in the imagination (and with the devil, apparently). The words one says to ones lover leading up to sex are as important, if not more so, than the places and ways you touch them.
I've come to the conclusion that if you can play make believe comfortably with someone as though you were still very young children, then your potential for awesome sex with that person is very high. Strangely, we discourage day dreamers and imaginative children... do we want to make our sex lives boring? Do we want to stomp out the divine spark of creativity in our bodies?
One final illustration.
When experiencing orgasm inside a woman I used to feel guilty and dirty for it, because I felt like a parasite trying to infect an innocent woman with my seed. I've heard couples fighting and women say things to hurt their partners to encourage this perception: that men are parasites just trying to spread their genetic disease to women then run away. Let me tell you as a man nothing is more deeply troubling to my soul to think of myself like that. Instead, when I orgasm now I think about how I'm potentially physically merging with this woman whom I love and admire. Part of me, merging with part of her to create a new life made from the two of us accepting each other.
I think the catholics have it all wrong. I think they actively encourage sexual perversion and the cheapening of sexual experience. I think they're very good at telling themselves that they hate sex because they love it so much. In any field of study, anyone who is proud of being ignorant is generally considered a shameful fool, so why are catholics so proud to be ignorant about sex?
I don't know about how most other religions regard sex, because they don't talk about it either... or maybe they just don't talk about it to prudish catholics, I just don't know. But being conscious and knowledgeable of ones sexuality is a spiritual and divine element to a human being in my opinion.
Sure, I can sit down with most men and have a discussion over which women are the most attractive, which quickly turns into an argument in my case because I'm quite comfortable pointing out that my tastes in women are not conventional, but if I wanted to bring up a more emotional topic like how I feel at the point of ejaculation then no way! Australian men quickly turn into prudes far too uncomfortable to talk about sexuality with any degree of insight or seriousness.
Strangely, Australians will often criticise foreigners, such as muslims, for being sexually repressed. Yet some of the 'sexiest' people I know are muslims. 'Sexiest' is in parenthesis because really, I don't think many people seriously think about what sexy is... I will get to this in more detail shortly. What I want to make clear at this juncture is that when it comes to talking about emotions and sex Australians are as repressed as that undifferentiated mass of muslims they like to contrast themselves against.
I can see that comment upsetting a lot of people already... good that's part of what I do here. :)
Where religion comes in for me, well I was raised catholic and I was left without any doubt that sex was a disgusting thing. Sure no one ever said explicitly to me that sex was disgusting. But at the same time no one talked about it except in awkward and uncomfortable tones... or in jokes as a rude topic. When ones only exposure to sex (because it is a taboo subject) is from dirty school yard jokes one starts to think that sex is just as unspiritual and dirty as those jokes.
But as a teenager, deeply interested in sex, I came across wicca and paganism. They treat sex in a completely different way... sex is a beautiful, sublime and spiritual experience. Both men and women are encouraged to think of their sexuality as divine and a beautiful aspect of themselves. Whereas catholicism was bent on convincing me that my sexuality was sinful and the pathway to the devil.
Although I am an atheist now I learned a great deal from my reading of wiccan texts on sex. Far more than I ever learned from the Bible... which seems to focus on the proverbial sexual appetite of King David to the point of ridicule and the justification for Lot's multiple acts of incest with his underage daughters. Jesus is a sexless or homosexual figure whom I never felt connected to as a sage on sexuality.
I feel that dogma has deeply harmed our sense of sexuality... because there is no aspect of humanity more involved in creativity and imagination than sex. Dogma stifles creativity and for this reason I feel the religious dogma is usually doomed to be sexophobic in the long run.
Why is sex a creative act? Firstly, the best sex is in ones head. Sure, 1 in 50 people have a face and body that just screams "great sex" but often they have a personality that screams "get stuffed" too. No, for most of us the key to great sex is in our imaginations: in love letters, poems, stories, pillow talk, sexting and erotic fantasy. When I first read about some of the testimony from the witch trials I vividly recall being in the school library feeling profoundly uncomfortable. I was reading about accused witches describing sexual encounters with the devil in graphically detailed confessions, after being tortured of course, and it was giving me powerful erections. I never told anyone this because I felt embarrassed and disgusted with myself. But clearly, there was something in those sexual fantasies created by these poor sexually repressed women that was exciting. Yes, sex with the devil must have been a lot of fun: dangerous, forbidden, exciting and unrepressed.
This brings me to one of the biggest problems of relationships today is keeping sex interesting. Think about this, we as a species have relationship problems because we don't know how to keep sex interesting. If you think this doesn't sound absurd then you've probably been living in a sexually repressed culture all your life. We are surrounded by a huge variety of entertainment forms and we don't ever get so bored of them as we do with our sexual partners. We can keep ourselves going to movies all through our lives, because although our tastes in films might change as we get older we never get bored of new movies so long as they're different, creative, dramatic and interesting.
And yet we get bored of sex? Something that we actually have an orgasm over? Something in my head just screams *crisis* whenever someone hints to me that they aren't satisfied with their sex life.
Again, we don't talk about it, we don't ask about it, we don't give each other practical advice on how to make sex better. Instead we suggest people modify their bodies artificially or through diets and exercise to achieve a sexiness that will rescue us from our woeful sex lives.
In church, no one asks for a genuine prayer from the heart like:
"Dear God, please relieve our poor humble sex lives of their boredom. Send me and my friends passionate sexy and considerate lovers who are not clingy yet deeply respectful. Make sure they are free of STDs and no unwanted pregnancies result. Teach them to touch us in just the right way to maximise the pleasure of our orgasms and find happiness through the bodily means you so generously bestowed on us for this purpose,"
No one would feel comfortable saying that out loud in a church and nor would anyone in the audience likely feel comfortable listening to it... but really... who doesn't secretly wish for a prayer like that to come true?
And as exciting as that prayer is, it still misses the point. Sexiness, like happiness, is all in the mind. If we want great sex we shouldn't be spending so much time worrying about the body. Instead we should be worrying about the heart.
For me, some of the biggest impediments I've had to enjoying sex is worry, fear and guilt. Worry because I'm terrified of disappointing my sexual partner, mostly because no one told me some really important information... like how to have sex - yes, some of you may laugh and say it just comes naturally, but when you've never seen a vagina before, much less felt the inside of one then it's a pretty nerve wracking experience. The kind of nerve wracking experience that gives a man temporary impotence from worry. Just briefly on that point, generally the best cure for impotence is to slow down, relax but not to give up. Instead we tend to ridicule and laugh at men brave enough to admit to having this problem making it much worse... to me that sounds like a psychological strategy to make other men infertile. Interesting, yes? Men can be bitchy too, although they're probably far less aware of what their psychological blows are meant to achieve.
So yes, the how to have sex was never adequately described and in my catholic sexual education, mostly given by female teachers (who obviously felt awkward talking about it to classrooms full of teenage boys), and I graduated with an absurd idea that the vagina was two squiggles of ink on a caricature of a woman. I wonder what the girls imagined a penis to be like? Although a penis is probably more self-explanatory than a vagina which is still a mystery to me to this day and I'm sure it is a mystery to many many women too.
But the secret to great sex is not where you put and touch the various genitals. The secret is being receptive to the experience of having sex. And being receptive is about being comfortable, feeling sexy and excited all at once - all things that happen in the imagination (and with the devil, apparently). The words one says to ones lover leading up to sex are as important, if not more so, than the places and ways you touch them.
I've come to the conclusion that if you can play make believe comfortably with someone as though you were still very young children, then your potential for awesome sex with that person is very high. Strangely, we discourage day dreamers and imaginative children... do we want to make our sex lives boring? Do we want to stomp out the divine spark of creativity in our bodies?
One final illustration.
When experiencing orgasm inside a woman I used to feel guilty and dirty for it, because I felt like a parasite trying to infect an innocent woman with my seed. I've heard couples fighting and women say things to hurt their partners to encourage this perception: that men are parasites just trying to spread their genetic disease to women then run away. Let me tell you as a man nothing is more deeply troubling to my soul to think of myself like that. Instead, when I orgasm now I think about how I'm potentially physically merging with this woman whom I love and admire. Part of me, merging with part of her to create a new life made from the two of us accepting each other.
I think the catholics have it all wrong. I think they actively encourage sexual perversion and the cheapening of sexual experience. I think they're very good at telling themselves that they hate sex because they love it so much. In any field of study, anyone who is proud of being ignorant is generally considered a shameful fool, so why are catholics so proud to be ignorant about sex?
I don't know about how most other religions regard sex, because they don't talk about it either... or maybe they just don't talk about it to prudish catholics, I just don't know. But being conscious and knowledgeable of ones sexuality is a spiritual and divine element to a human being in my opinion.
20 December, 2009
Atheism and Love
I was chatting to a friend yesterday about a topic that related to my previous post about Atheism and Marriage. That is, how much effort one should put into a relationship and is it possible to actually have a relationship involving more than two people?
I said in that post, "The only real problem is that we often lack the social skills to have one good friendship in our lives... much less three." This statement probably sounds shocking to many people, but honestly, how many people do feel helpless in doing away with the endless cycle of problems they seem to have in many of their friendships?
I would like to put forward my viewpoint that we're approaching relationships in the completely wrong way. We're looking at a friendship as an end goal: security, love, kindness and compassion whenever we need it. Truly, friendship is the greatest gift a human being is capable of giving, and often it is taken for granted or dismissed casually in statements like "we're only friends." While friendships are all of these things... we're expecting them to just 'happen' naturally and spontaneously. Once an international student asked me: "are we friending?" They used the wrong verb, but in so doing they produced a whole new concept: friendship as a process.
I believe that friendship is a process and all processes require one to put energy into it. No two people are exactly alike... most often they aren't even close to it. So you'll probably never meet a person with whom you agree with them on everything. So, you're going to have conflicts and disagreements with that person, it is inevitable. So how to do you deal with them? Generally, because laziness is a good survival strategy for any organism, we use the least personally demanding option. We can: ignore it, deny it, ridicule it, guilt/shame them into changing their mind or keep it to themselves and so on. But to accept, investigate, discover, understand and appreciate the difference requires more effort.
I think that it is always worth the effort to seek to understand these differences in our friends. Like my ealier story with Pandora implies; curing a disease is more meaningful than simply exterminating everyone with the disease. For example: if we just killed every person with haemophilia or who carry the disease in their genetics we could eliminate this disease forever. However, if we cure haemophilia in the process we become far far wiser about how blood clots, how blood works, how blood is created, how our genetics work, how our genetics can be repaired etc... while one group can say "we solved the problem," the group that cured it can say, "we cured it, understood the problem, learned a lot more about ourselves and even improved ourselves both in wisdom and compassion (and maybe genetically as well?) through curing it,"
I get annoyed when people associate 'love' exclusively with romantic relationships. I honestly believe love was originally intended to describe friendships not romantic relationships. But somewhere along the line we've stopped thinking clearly about the fact that at the root of romance is sex, lust and reproduction - not love.
Rather 'to love' is an extreme form of the verb 'to like' and is rather disrespected in English to this end nowadays. But how can we love someone who is so different from us? Two ways, the first is that we're ignorant of how different we are to that person - this is an unstable form of love - secondly, we have put the effort into getting to know that person inside-out and we don't feel threatened by the differences we have. I guess I've just invented the terms 'weak love' and 'strong love' much like 'weak atheism' and 'strong atheism' (weak = ignorant, strong = informed).
The conclusion, if we want to love someone in the strong sense we need to put energy, time and effort into the relationship. We need to create an environment where the other person feels comfortable being open, honest and safe telling you their problems, vices and limitations - while at the same time the other person allows you to feel the same by putting in a recipricol effort. How can creatures such as ourselves full of prejudices, insecurities and ignorance do this? By changing, by listening, by growing in self-knowledge and knowledge about other people and where they're coming from.
I believe that if more people put the time and effort needed to bridge cultural, sexual, emotional differences that in the future the spontaneous formation of quaples and other complex social structures built upon the basic framework of friendship can become possible, easier and desireable. The thing is, almost everyone is capable of friendship and love... all that is required is a different perspective:
Why are the people who need love the most also the hardest to love?
Because love requires sacrifice and the harder you have to push yourself to love another person, the more you'll learn, grow and develop as an individual.
What about freeloaders and cheats?
If the other person won't put the effort you are putting into the relationship then it isn't going to work. There is nothing wrong in giving up on a person who doesn't try at all. While yes, you could still learn a lot from the endeavour, however, the one giving that much effort shouldn't expect or depend on it succeeding less they be compromised and exploited.
Again, there's nothing about sex in here because I don't see what it has to do with love. Friendship extends across all borders, including species (cats, dogs, pigs, horses etc...) and probably in the future it will include artificial intelligences as well. While saying that, loving the person with whom you have sexual intercourse with is a great thing... but I would hope that you're friends with the person you're having sex with first and that friendship is the root of the love. (Although if you're not friends with the person you're having sexual relations with and you're both ok with that I have no problems with that either - it just isn't my cup of tea).
I said in that post, "The only real problem is that we often lack the social skills to have one good friendship in our lives... much less three." This statement probably sounds shocking to many people, but honestly, how many people do feel helpless in doing away with the endless cycle of problems they seem to have in many of their friendships?
I would like to put forward my viewpoint that we're approaching relationships in the completely wrong way. We're looking at a friendship as an end goal: security, love, kindness and compassion whenever we need it. Truly, friendship is the greatest gift a human being is capable of giving, and often it is taken for granted or dismissed casually in statements like "we're only friends." While friendships are all of these things... we're expecting them to just 'happen' naturally and spontaneously. Once an international student asked me: "are we friending?" They used the wrong verb, but in so doing they produced a whole new concept: friendship as a process.
I believe that friendship is a process and all processes require one to put energy into it. No two people are exactly alike... most often they aren't even close to it. So you'll probably never meet a person with whom you agree with them on everything. So, you're going to have conflicts and disagreements with that person, it is inevitable. So how to do you deal with them? Generally, because laziness is a good survival strategy for any organism, we use the least personally demanding option. We can: ignore it, deny it, ridicule it, guilt/shame them into changing their mind or keep it to themselves and so on. But to accept, investigate, discover, understand and appreciate the difference requires more effort.
I think that it is always worth the effort to seek to understand these differences in our friends. Like my ealier story with Pandora implies; curing a disease is more meaningful than simply exterminating everyone with the disease. For example: if we just killed every person with haemophilia or who carry the disease in their genetics we could eliminate this disease forever. However, if we cure haemophilia in the process we become far far wiser about how blood clots, how blood works, how blood is created, how our genetics work, how our genetics can be repaired etc... while one group can say "we solved the problem," the group that cured it can say, "we cured it, understood the problem, learned a lot more about ourselves and even improved ourselves both in wisdom and compassion (and maybe genetically as well?) through curing it,"
I get annoyed when people associate 'love' exclusively with romantic relationships. I honestly believe love was originally intended to describe friendships not romantic relationships. But somewhere along the line we've stopped thinking clearly about the fact that at the root of romance is sex, lust and reproduction - not love.
Rather 'to love' is an extreme form of the verb 'to like' and is rather disrespected in English to this end nowadays. But how can we love someone who is so different from us? Two ways, the first is that we're ignorant of how different we are to that person - this is an unstable form of love - secondly, we have put the effort into getting to know that person inside-out and we don't feel threatened by the differences we have. I guess I've just invented the terms 'weak love' and 'strong love' much like 'weak atheism' and 'strong atheism' (weak = ignorant, strong = informed).
The conclusion, if we want to love someone in the strong sense we need to put energy, time and effort into the relationship. We need to create an environment where the other person feels comfortable being open, honest and safe telling you their problems, vices and limitations - while at the same time the other person allows you to feel the same by putting in a recipricol effort. How can creatures such as ourselves full of prejudices, insecurities and ignorance do this? By changing, by listening, by growing in self-knowledge and knowledge about other people and where they're coming from.
I believe that if more people put the time and effort needed to bridge cultural, sexual, emotional differences that in the future the spontaneous formation of quaples and other complex social structures built upon the basic framework of friendship can become possible, easier and desireable. The thing is, almost everyone is capable of friendship and love... all that is required is a different perspective:
Why are the people who need love the most also the hardest to love?
Because love requires sacrifice and the harder you have to push yourself to love another person, the more you'll learn, grow and develop as an individual.
What about freeloaders and cheats?
If the other person won't put the effort you are putting into the relationship then it isn't going to work. There is nothing wrong in giving up on a person who doesn't try at all. While yes, you could still learn a lot from the endeavour, however, the one giving that much effort shouldn't expect or depend on it succeeding less they be compromised and exploited.
Again, there's nothing about sex in here because I don't see what it has to do with love. Friendship extends across all borders, including species (cats, dogs, pigs, horses etc...) and probably in the future it will include artificial intelligences as well. While saying that, loving the person with whom you have sexual intercourse with is a great thing... but I would hope that you're friends with the person you're having sex with first and that friendship is the root of the love. (Although if you're not friends with the person you're having sexual relations with and you're both ok with that I have no problems with that either - it just isn't my cup of tea).
Sex... Why are we so hung up on it?
Recently I saw this video clip on the Daily Beast:
Apparently, the Governor has a relationship with an escort and it's her fault.
Once again, as an atheist I feel it is my duty to strip away all of the dogma on how human beings are supposed to engage in sexual intercourse with each other and expose the prejudice here. When women label other women as 'sluts', 'whores', 'prostitutes' or whatever, they are living out what happened in the Stanford Prison Experiment. They feel once a women is publicly labelled as a slut that they can vent their repressed anger, jealously and frustration onto her. Why? Because they know they can get away with it.
This is immoral. Religious people often attack and demonise homosexuals and Jews for the same reasons. This is one of the things that upsets me most about religious people - they use the prejudices written in their dogma to justify the dehumanisation and venting of their frustration onto them.
I feel as an atheist I have to acknowledge that I have many feelings that are anti-social. Sometimes I get angry with beautiful people because they're shallow... sometimes I get angry with them because I'm very jealous. I believe that's part of being human I don't feel diminished in dignity and purity by admitting that I have destructive thoughts and feelings sometimes.
The majority of the women on this talk show appear to me to be angry with Mz. Dupree not because she had sex with lots of men but because she is beautiful, earned a lot of money doing something she enjoyed and managed to mingle with the creme-de-la-creme of society seemingly without any effort on her part. These are not good reasons to hate someone and the women on The View should feel ashamed not Mz. Dupree.
That said, I do find Mz. Dupree's sweeping generalisations about men irritating as she is only talking about her clientele and dating preferences not all men.
Conclusion, we often define mental illness as simply attributes some people have that we don't like. We invent reasons why their behaviour is bad after we've decided it is bad*. We then tell them it is their fault and their responsibility to change themselves when they can't really help being who they are. It is a twisted savage way of thinking.
* If you think that this is preposterous try this thought experiment: find a quality in a person that society considers 'good' then pretend that it's bad and think of reasons why it could be bad. You'll probably surprise yourself thinking about all the reasons why you could hate the 'good' things about some people.
Apparently, the Governor has a relationship with an escort and it's her fault.
Once again, as an atheist I feel it is my duty to strip away all of the dogma on how human beings are supposed to engage in sexual intercourse with each other and expose the prejudice here. When women label other women as 'sluts', 'whores', 'prostitutes' or whatever, they are living out what happened in the Stanford Prison Experiment. They feel once a women is publicly labelled as a slut that they can vent their repressed anger, jealously and frustration onto her. Why? Because they know they can get away with it.
This is immoral. Religious people often attack and demonise homosexuals and Jews for the same reasons. This is one of the things that upsets me most about religious people - they use the prejudices written in their dogma to justify the dehumanisation and venting of their frustration onto them.
I feel as an atheist I have to acknowledge that I have many feelings that are anti-social. Sometimes I get angry with beautiful people because they're shallow... sometimes I get angry with them because I'm very jealous. I believe that's part of being human I don't feel diminished in dignity and purity by admitting that I have destructive thoughts and feelings sometimes.
The majority of the women on this talk show appear to me to be angry with Mz. Dupree not because she had sex with lots of men but because she is beautiful, earned a lot of money doing something she enjoyed and managed to mingle with the creme-de-la-creme of society seemingly without any effort on her part. These are not good reasons to hate someone and the women on The View should feel ashamed not Mz. Dupree.
That said, I do find Mz. Dupree's sweeping generalisations about men irritating as she is only talking about her clientele and dating preferences not all men.
Conclusion, we often define mental illness as simply attributes some people have that we don't like. We invent reasons why their behaviour is bad after we've decided it is bad*. We then tell them it is their fault and their responsibility to change themselves when they can't really help being who they are. It is a twisted savage way of thinking.
* If you think that this is preposterous try this thought experiment: find a quality in a person that society considers 'good' then pretend that it's bad and think of reasons why it could be bad. You'll probably surprise yourself thinking about all the reasons why you could hate the 'good' things about some people.
15 December, 2009
Atheism and Marriage
This is a big topic and not really one I can do justice to here. But I thought I might throw out a few daring and challenging ideas today. Also, if anyone wants me to write about a particular topic feel free to email me and I'll see about writing an atheist perspective on it.
So let's start. Firstly, every atheist I know has a different opinion on this topic so don't think I'm representing all atheist. Rather in the spirit of the Rabbi's (See first post) postulation that atheists strip away all dogma and idolatry I'm going attempt to strip away all dogma away from the institute of marriage.
Firstly, what is marriage? Many people have different ideas but the best I've heard is apparently from Emmanual Kant (although I've extended it a little): Marriage is a legal agreement between a man and a woman whereby each consigns the access rights to their genitals to the other person for the purpose of reproduction, child-rearing and determining inheritance.
Well the first question that comes to my mind as a liberal is, "Why would anyone be so willing to give up a right? For that matter one that includes access to their body and who gets all of their valuables when they die?"
Now traditionally, and still in many parts of the world, marriage is arranged for the couple and they have no say in the matter. So in this case marriage is simply enslavement forced onto the individuals and the stronger of the two is the master.
So what reasons would a person choose to get married for if it was a free choice?
I'm sure there are more, but in the 5 minutes I was jotting this down during lunch I could only think of these 5.
1. Raising children in a safe, secure and supported environment.
2. Financial security in case of sickness, old age and imfirmity.
3. Emotional security against loneliness, abandonment and depression.
4. Love, because you care for someone at least almost as much as yourself.
5. Guaranteeing the paternity of the offspring and the inheritance of property through the family name.
Now, none of these arguments are very strong. Yes, sure, people might get married for a number of reasons, probably a combination... but if none of these reasons are good ones it begs two questions: why get married at all? OR Why not reform marriage into an institution that you'd like to be a part of?
The problems I see with these arguments are summarised below:
1. About half of families are not safe, secure and supported environments due to neglectful parenting, stupid parenting and poor parents. Even if one parent is attentive the other can just as easily be completely neglecting them. Also, same sex and defacto couples are just as capable providing (and neglecting) children with a safe, secure and supported environment. Because it works maybe 50% of the time I am tempted to say it has moderate strength as an argument then again would you join any other social institution if there was only a 50-50 chance of getting benefits after investing so much time and money?
2. This is actually not a bad argument. Give up a little freedom in return for knowing that if you lose your job, get sick or succumb to depression there will always be someone else there to share in your misery and help you out. Kind of like a third parent. However, the only problem is that no-fault divorce is legal now and so these agreements wouldn't be worth the paper it is written on. But in other countries were divorce is difficult this is a good deal, at least for the men that is.
3. This is similar to the first one except, unlike unfortunate events in ones life that one doesn't have control over, in this situation one can just have friends and an active social life and they don't really need to give up access to their genitals to get it.
4. I really do like the idea of love... but I haven't yet seen anyone actually love someone as much as themselves. For example, if you are a man and you care for the maximum benefit of your wife you will know that a varied and exciting sex life is often important for her happiness. Also, the genetic diversity of her children is a concern for her on a biological level so how many men actively encourage their wives to have multiple sexual partners and a different paternity for each of her children? While still supporting and raising them as though they were his own? Also, how many men are encouraged by their wives to go out and impregnate as many women as they can to fulfil their biological desire to spread their seed? Clearly in a marriage such satisfaction of the other person's desires cannot be met so both parties decide to mutually limit what desires they can actually have fulfilled. So both parties put themselves in uncomfortable anxiety producing situations... such sexual repression is bound to be unhealthy and to appear in other forms such as infidelity, homosexuality, porn addiction, pedophilia, anger, anxiety driven sleep loss, desire not to be home or with their spouse, etc...
If both parties are asexual then I suppose it would work very nicely for them. But what about the children?
Otherwise, if you really loved someone that much... why would you make them suffer through marriage only to eventually divorce them?
5. This one probably makes the most sense. A man might feel uncomfortable about whether or not his woman's children are his own so he'll take her into his house where he can keep her better under surveilance and the institute of marriage can act as social pressure to keep her from abandoning him or sleeping with other men and thus helping to reassure him that his progeny actually inherit his property. What the woman actually gets out of this situation isn't so clear though. As this arrangement is clearly assymetrically in favour of the man so let's just consign this idea to the patriarchal past.
So... what am I saying? End the institution of marriage? No, I am not saying that at all. If traditional marriage works for you then you don't need to change anything. But if traditional marriage isn't enough or is too much then I believe there is no reason why we can't use our natural human inventiveness to come up with a creative solution.
Firstly, it is not wrong to expect more out of marriage, it is a feeling and it ought to be respected. Also, often demanding more isn't a bad thing. Often it leads to improvements and innovations that people more content would never have invested the time and energy into developing.
My personal take on how we should redesign marriage is to come up with a solution that meets all 5 of the previous arguments for a marriage and see how well it goes in addressing those.
One alternative I've considered is a 'quaple' or a marriage of four people.
A quaple is a group of 4 adults (any combination of sexes) who decide to pool their emotional, financial and biological resources into raising children in a safe, supportive and secure environment and taking care of each other's needs.
1. With four people raising children there is a lot more space for discussing parenting ideas, learning from each other, having the right parent nurture the right child in the right way. Help them with their homework and explore their interests. They can also provide more income and greater resistance to financial hardship thus a more stable environment for the children.
2. 4 incomes versus 2, or more realistically 3 incomes versus 1, provides far more financial security.
3. It is harder to get tired of the lifelong company of 3 friends than only 1.
4. There is no law of nature that says a person can only fall in love once in their life or that they could only love one person adequately. While such a devotion can be touching it actually reeks of insecurity and personal weakness. If your life centres around one particular person... what happens if they die or decide they don't love you anymore? Simple: total breakdown. Conversely if you depend on just one person, and they can't always be there to give to you, then you're setting yourself up for disappointment. A strong person loves many people because they are loved by many people. They might give less individually but overall they give and receive the same amount but with the security of consistent support and not occasional support. If you are a jealous person and must control(/have) someone (all to yourself)... then that is your fear for yourself speaking, not your love for them. Confusing them is a common mistake for atheists and non-atheists alike.
5. OK... I don't think men will ever have it this good ever again. Though really, it wasn't a good system for the men anyway on a spiritual level. Insecurity about whether or not ones seed will be passed on in ones children is another form of insecurity. I think it is like insecurity about death. You can stay up all night worrying about it but it won't change the fact you're going to die. You can control and chain up your wife at home with a 24 video surveilance system on her... or you can accept that whether or not your sperm makes it into the mix for the next generation doesn't really matter on three grounds:
1. There are close to 7 billion people who already share 99.9% of your genetics.
2. You won't live to see the future so you can't know if your children live, die, succeed, fail or commit murder etc...
3. In the future genetic engineering will remove all diseases from people and designer babies will be normal. The days of 'your' genetics being special in any way are numbered.
So really, this is an insecurity like any other: it is learned and it can be unlearned. Once unlearned it will free one to experience much more fulfilling emotions.
Honestly, the fact is that quaples are better than couples in all counts of practicality. The only real problem is that we often lack the social skills to have one good friendship in our lives... much less three. It is a frightening idea thinking about all of the arguments and conflicts you could have with three people: all of them ganging up on you for example. However, if one has good social skills and a good sense of empathy then it is possible to do it. And hey, good social skills and empathy are good precisely because they allow one to work in such complicated social structures as a team or a quaple. Why? Because team work always beats individual ability. The champion team is better than the team of champions.
So let's start. Firstly, every atheist I know has a different opinion on this topic so don't think I'm representing all atheist. Rather in the spirit of the Rabbi's (See first post) postulation that atheists strip away all dogma and idolatry I'm going attempt to strip away all dogma away from the institute of marriage.
Firstly, what is marriage? Many people have different ideas but the best I've heard is apparently from Emmanual Kant (although I've extended it a little): Marriage is a legal agreement between a man and a woman whereby each consigns the access rights to their genitals to the other person for the purpose of reproduction, child-rearing and determining inheritance.
Well the first question that comes to my mind as a liberal is, "Why would anyone be so willing to give up a right? For that matter one that includes access to their body and who gets all of their valuables when they die?"
Now traditionally, and still in many parts of the world, marriage is arranged for the couple and they have no say in the matter. So in this case marriage is simply enslavement forced onto the individuals and the stronger of the two is the master.
So what reasons would a person choose to get married for if it was a free choice?
I'm sure there are more, but in the 5 minutes I was jotting this down during lunch I could only think of these 5.
1. Raising children in a safe, secure and supported environment.
2. Financial security in case of sickness, old age and imfirmity.
3. Emotional security against loneliness, abandonment and depression.
4. Love, because you care for someone at least almost as much as yourself.
5. Guaranteeing the paternity of the offspring and the inheritance of property through the family name.
Now, none of these arguments are very strong. Yes, sure, people might get married for a number of reasons, probably a combination... but if none of these reasons are good ones it begs two questions: why get married at all? OR Why not reform marriage into an institution that you'd like to be a part of?
The problems I see with these arguments are summarised below:
1. About half of families are not safe, secure and supported environments due to neglectful parenting, stupid parenting and poor parents. Even if one parent is attentive the other can just as easily be completely neglecting them. Also, same sex and defacto couples are just as capable providing (and neglecting) children with a safe, secure and supported environment. Because it works maybe 50% of the time I am tempted to say it has moderate strength as an argument then again would you join any other social institution if there was only a 50-50 chance of getting benefits after investing so much time and money?
2. This is actually not a bad argument. Give up a little freedom in return for knowing that if you lose your job, get sick or succumb to depression there will always be someone else there to share in your misery and help you out. Kind of like a third parent. However, the only problem is that no-fault divorce is legal now and so these agreements wouldn't be worth the paper it is written on. But in other countries were divorce is difficult this is a good deal, at least for the men that is.
3. This is similar to the first one except, unlike unfortunate events in ones life that one doesn't have control over, in this situation one can just have friends and an active social life and they don't really need to give up access to their genitals to get it.
4. I really do like the idea of love... but I haven't yet seen anyone actually love someone as much as themselves. For example, if you are a man and you care for the maximum benefit of your wife you will know that a varied and exciting sex life is often important for her happiness. Also, the genetic diversity of her children is a concern for her on a biological level so how many men actively encourage their wives to have multiple sexual partners and a different paternity for each of her children? While still supporting and raising them as though they were his own? Also, how many men are encouraged by their wives to go out and impregnate as many women as they can to fulfil their biological desire to spread their seed? Clearly in a marriage such satisfaction of the other person's desires cannot be met so both parties decide to mutually limit what desires they can actually have fulfilled. So both parties put themselves in uncomfortable anxiety producing situations... such sexual repression is bound to be unhealthy and to appear in other forms such as infidelity, homosexuality, porn addiction, pedophilia, anger, anxiety driven sleep loss, desire not to be home or with their spouse, etc...
If both parties are asexual then I suppose it would work very nicely for them. But what about the children?
Otherwise, if you really loved someone that much... why would you make them suffer through marriage only to eventually divorce them?
5. This one probably makes the most sense. A man might feel uncomfortable about whether or not his woman's children are his own so he'll take her into his house where he can keep her better under surveilance and the institute of marriage can act as social pressure to keep her from abandoning him or sleeping with other men and thus helping to reassure him that his progeny actually inherit his property. What the woman actually gets out of this situation isn't so clear though. As this arrangement is clearly assymetrically in favour of the man so let's just consign this idea to the patriarchal past.
So... what am I saying? End the institution of marriage? No, I am not saying that at all. If traditional marriage works for you then you don't need to change anything. But if traditional marriage isn't enough or is too much then I believe there is no reason why we can't use our natural human inventiveness to come up with a creative solution.
Firstly, it is not wrong to expect more out of marriage, it is a feeling and it ought to be respected. Also, often demanding more isn't a bad thing. Often it leads to improvements and innovations that people more content would never have invested the time and energy into developing.
My personal take on how we should redesign marriage is to come up with a solution that meets all 5 of the previous arguments for a marriage and see how well it goes in addressing those.
One alternative I've considered is a 'quaple' or a marriage of four people.
A quaple is a group of 4 adults (any combination of sexes) who decide to pool their emotional, financial and biological resources into raising children in a safe, supportive and secure environment and taking care of each other's needs.
1. With four people raising children there is a lot more space for discussing parenting ideas, learning from each other, having the right parent nurture the right child in the right way. Help them with their homework and explore their interests. They can also provide more income and greater resistance to financial hardship thus a more stable environment for the children.
2. 4 incomes versus 2, or more realistically 3 incomes versus 1, provides far more financial security.
3. It is harder to get tired of the lifelong company of 3 friends than only 1.
4. There is no law of nature that says a person can only fall in love once in their life or that they could only love one person adequately. While such a devotion can be touching it actually reeks of insecurity and personal weakness. If your life centres around one particular person... what happens if they die or decide they don't love you anymore? Simple: total breakdown. Conversely if you depend on just one person, and they can't always be there to give to you, then you're setting yourself up for disappointment. A strong person loves many people because they are loved by many people. They might give less individually but overall they give and receive the same amount but with the security of consistent support and not occasional support. If you are a jealous person and must control(/have) someone (all to yourself)... then that is your fear for yourself speaking, not your love for them. Confusing them is a common mistake for atheists and non-atheists alike.
5. OK... I don't think men will ever have it this good ever again. Though really, it wasn't a good system for the men anyway on a spiritual level. Insecurity about whether or not ones seed will be passed on in ones children is another form of insecurity. I think it is like insecurity about death. You can stay up all night worrying about it but it won't change the fact you're going to die. You can control and chain up your wife at home with a 24 video surveilance system on her... or you can accept that whether or not your sperm makes it into the mix for the next generation doesn't really matter on three grounds:
1. There are close to 7 billion people who already share 99.9% of your genetics.
2. You won't live to see the future so you can't know if your children live, die, succeed, fail or commit murder etc...
3. In the future genetic engineering will remove all diseases from people and designer babies will be normal. The days of 'your' genetics being special in any way are numbered.
So really, this is an insecurity like any other: it is learned and it can be unlearned. Once unlearned it will free one to experience much more fulfilling emotions.
Honestly, the fact is that quaples are better than couples in all counts of practicality. The only real problem is that we often lack the social skills to have one good friendship in our lives... much less three. It is a frightening idea thinking about all of the arguments and conflicts you could have with three people: all of them ganging up on you for example. However, if one has good social skills and a good sense of empathy then it is possible to do it. And hey, good social skills and empathy are good precisely because they allow one to work in such complicated social structures as a team or a quaple. Why? Because team work always beats individual ability. The champion team is better than the team of champions.
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